TV News LIES

Jim Lovell, an astronaut best known as the commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13, has died. He was 97.

NASA announced his death Friday and included this statement from his family: "We are enormously proud of his amazing life and career accomplishments, highlighted by his legendary leadership in pioneering human space flight. But, to all of us, he was Dad, Granddad, and the Leader of our family. Most importantly, he was our Hero. We will miss his unshakeable optimism, his sense of humor, and the way he made each of us feel we could do the impossible. He was truly one of a kind."

The Apollo 13 mission almost ended in catastrophe after an explosion crippled the spacecraft and took a herculean effort to bring home the three-astronaut crew.

Lovell's NASA career was peppered with firsts. His first flight — Gemini 7 in 1965 — set a space endurance record of almost 14 days. After Lovell commanded Gemini 12, he'd flown in space longer than any other person at that point. His next flight, Apollo 8, was the first time humans left Earth orbit.

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has gotten an up-close look at a headline-grabbing object known as 3I/ATLAS that has recently wandered into Earth's cosmic neighborhood from far away.

The image, which NASA bills as "the sharpest-ever picture" of an object most astronomers agree is almost definitely a comet, depicts the interstellar visitor that originated from outside our solar system from elsewhere in the Milky Way.

3I/ATLAS first made news in early July when scientists confirmed it as the third-ever observed interstellar interloper in our solar system. The space object further attracted the public's fascination again later in the month when a controversial astrophysicist from Harvard University began claiming it could be an alien spaceship.

What we definitely know about 3I/ATLAS is that it has been drifting through interstellar space for billions of years, gaining speed from the gravitational slingshot effect of passing countless stars and nebulas.

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The US Department of Energy has reported the discovery of a radioactive wasp nest at one of its facilities in South Carolina that was once involved in the production of parts for nuclear weapons.

According to a 22 July department report, the contaminated nest was discovered at the facility – the Savannah River site – on 3 July near tanks used to store liquid nuclear waste.

It said the nest was sprayed and was disposed of as radiological waste, and that testing confirmed radiation levels “greater than 10 times the total contamination values” that federal regulations allow.

The contaminated wasp nest was the result of “onsite legacy radioactive contamination” and “not related to a loss of contamination control”, the Department of Energy stated in the report.

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If you’re hiking or camping in the arid Southwest and West in the next few months, get ready for what could be the experience – or fright – of a lifetime.

Across the United States, in California, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico and Texas, tens of thousands of tarantulas will being crawling out of their burrows in search of females – making for a fascinating, if a little creepy – display of the wonders of nature.

It’s tarantula mating season.

“If you’re lucky enough you can sometimes see them in hordes crossing the roads at certain times of the year,” said Dan McCamish, a senior environmental scientist with California State Parks.

His advice? Leave them alone.

"It’s a wild animal – it doesn’t want to be picked up and loved and hugged,” he said. “In general the species is very docile, but if you were to handle one they could bite you.”

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Employees of the National Science Foundation (NSF) are going public with concerns about “politically motivated and legally questionable” actions by the Trump administration related to their agency.

Their concerns range from mass firings by the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency to interference with the grant process. 

In particular, the employees allege that for grants, “a covert and ideologically driven secondary review process by unqualified political appointees is now interfering with the scientific merit-based review system.”

The accusation and others are detailed in a letter addressed to Rep. Zoe Lofgren (Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. Lofgren said at a press conference that the letter was being submitted to her office as “a protected whistleblower disclosure.”

It was signed by 149 staffers, virtually all of whom signed either anonymously or whose names were redacted in the version of the letter that was made public on Tuesday.

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The Trump administration on Monday took another step to make it harder to find major, legally mandated scientific assessments of how climate change is endangering the nation and its people.https://www.npr.org/2025/07/01/nx-s1-5453501/national-climate-assessment-nca5-archive-report

Earlier this month, the official government websites that hosted the authoritative, peer-reviewed national climate assessments went dark. Such sites tell state and local governments and the public what to expect in their backyards from a warming world and how best to adapt to it. At the time, the White House said NASA would house the reports to comply with a 1990 law that requires the reports, which the space agency said it planned to do.

But on Monday, NASA announced that it aborted those plans.

"The USGCRP (the government agency that oversees and used to host the report) met its statutory requirements by presenting its reports to Congress. NASA has no lreegal obligations to host globalchange.gov's data," NASA Press Secretary Bethany Stevens said in an email. That means no data from the assessment or the government science office that coordinated the work will be on NASA, she said.

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